Archive for January, 2010

Whether you’re new to Quiche Moraine because you’re curious or follow one of the main cobloggers here on Twitter or Facebook, chances are good you’ve seen the words “libel” and “defamation” floating around very recently. Here’s the scoop.

I am aware that people have negative impressions of atheists, that it is a choice of word that can lead people to dislike me or claim that I am being fundamentalist or arrogant. I hold that the atheist position is just as honorable as any other position that anyone else has in regard to religion and theology and that it can’t be made more palatable by atheists shying from the word. So I tell people when they ask me, “I am an atheist.”

This Friday, Stephanie Zvan will join Desiree Schell and two other guests on Skeptically Speaking to discuss Skepticism and Race.

On the next episode of Skeptically Speaking, a panel discussion on skepticism and race. Is the face of modern skepticism really as monochrome as it appears? How do we make our message appeal to a broader, more diverse audience? And how do racial demographics influence belief in pseudoscience and the paranormal?

Loftus said that they are not wrong nor stupid for being religious and even discussed the skeptical nature of the most intelligent of the apologists. Loftus made the case that, in fact, people such as William Lane Craig are probably more intelligent than he is. I can name some religious thinkers far more intelligent than I am. The issue with religion is not intelligence. The issue is that of core values, and presupposition.

For many topics of interest to the average person, there seem to be two utterly different and diametrically opposed worlds of information. These worlds are so different that one might be called “Normal World” and the other might be called “Bizarro World.” It is possible, in fact likely, that each of these worlds works the way it does in large part because the other world exists. Not just good and evil, right and wrong, obverse and reverse, but in true yin and yang fashion, one world is shaped by the shape of the other, and this can be said of both.

If you follow the race-IQ discussion, you’ll note that the entire edifice is calibrated to questions of work and class. As long as classism stands, the arguments of inherent ability will be plausible to far too many people, and the problem of blacks in poverty will be used to justify itself. Just as racism has always been used to justify poverty.

This county road runs on a diagonal, northwest-southeast. Most of the time this doesn’t cause a perspective problem for me, except when I approach it from an east-west road…as I always do when coming from home. For some reason, my perspective overrides my rational understanding of directionality. It overrides my knowledge that the sun rises in a generally easterly direction and sets in a generally westerly direction depending on the time of year.

In December, Stephanie, Greg and I sat down in the studios of Metro Cable Network to tape a segment of the Atheists Talk TV show. We talked about us, about you and about how we all find each other and promote each other and be social atheists from distances sometimes made near.

Heathrow is the world’s largest and busiest airport, second only to Schiphol in Amsterdam and JFK in New York. All three are eclipsed, of course, by O’Hare in Chicago and Minneapolis/Saint Paul airport in Bloomington, Minnesota.